DESPITE the existence of the Petroleum Industry Act, it has not attracted potential investors into the Nigerian oil and gas sector, an industry expert, Bala Zaka, has said.
Zaka told our correspondent that investors were not coming and the reason was because of the current business climate hostilities.
He said, “Instead of investors coming to Nigeria, international oil and gas companies are divesting out of the land and swamp oil assets. That is very bad for Nigeria.
“No investors are coming, rather they are running away because Nigeria is experiencing business climate hostilities. Nigeria is not even able to meet up with its OPEC production quota not to talk of meeting up with our domestic production budget volume.”
Zaka added, “When the Petroleum Industry Bill was brought up, it was rushed. What some of us expected was that the necessary authorities were supposed to congregate oil and gas journalists, accountants, economists, lawyers, engineers and environmentalists.
“All these oil and gas experts are supposed to come up together and look at the document. Because when you hear the word ‘production’ an oil and gas engineer sees it differently from an economist point of view.”
He stated that if all the experts had analysed and agreed on the document before passing it, they would have made sure everything was put in place.
“But they decided to rush it by making sure that Nigeria becomes an import dependent country,” he stated.
He added, “Let them show us any investor that has come from the time they passed the bill into law and it became an Act.”
The PIA was passed into law in August 2021 after about two decades of delay.
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